Western academic and corporate culture is infested with the idealization of a certain kind of mentorship: the mentor imparts skills and wisdom to the protege, who thereby develops and grows in his abilities and ultimately emerges as a force of social or artistic significance.

Well, I've certainly had some awesome teachers at various times in my life, men and women who've had a dramatic impact on my social and artistic skills. But in my experience, the dramatic realization of a consuming artistic or social sense of purpose takes a different kind of mentoring. The acknowledgements in My Life with Master include the following:

"Ron Edwards, who showed me what was holding me back."

And he absolutely did. My first effort at narrativism was running Everway in early 2001. I'd prep. And then I'd have a phone conversation with Ron about my plans, during which he'd take me to task for any railroading or deprotagonizing events I'd baked into them. Post-play, we'd talk about my decisionmaking during play, and he'd take me to task for railroading and obstructivist handling of NPCs. My second effort at narrativism was running The Pool. And that's when I nailed it.

I'm a believer that social and artistic purpose isn't something you learn by developing social and artistic ablities. Ron didn't concern himself with developing my game design abilities. And neither did he inject me with social and artistic purpose. He scraped away the cruft that was holding me back from achieving my own social and artistic purpose.

So, my question. Who unlearnt you? Who took the time to scrape away your cruft?

Paul

"Take me to task", clarify what this means?

I don't need(or don't think so anyway) someone to unteach me in regards to studying. I need someone to take away the cruft regarding my social and emotional life. Hopefully the psychiatrist I go to will succeed, but he said he feels we're not going anywhere and he may have to stop meeting me the last time I went to meet him :(

Heya,

For me, it would be Ron Edwards.  Specifically, through the Ronny contests.

Peace,

-Troy

Ron, definitely. Mostly just talking, mostly online, some on the phone later on. Although he had started earlier, he really took me to task on Dust Devils in its initial form (and, simultaneously gushed about it then, too).

Also, Jared. Mostly by doing what he does in his game, and lots by just hanging out with him at cons and talking.

Fuck, I wish I'd had a mentor to talk to on the phone and cool shit like that.

I got stuck out in the cold with the fucking wolves and had to learn to build fire myself.

I mean, I did have a mail-order manual from Ron and occasional fights with people on the HeroQuest list, but it didn't stop the fucking savages from trying to fucking eat me.

Once I'd finally gotten a fire going, then and only then does fucking Mike Holmes come along and start telling me how to use the fire to make tools. Now, by then I was already starting to figure it out myself, crawling slowly out of the brain-damage of the cromagnon age -- but Mike did show me shit then that I wouldn't have figured out otherwise. So Mike will always have my gratitude for explaining to me how to make a pointy stick.

After that was my spazz phase, in which I'd flip flop in atavistic glee between staying at the fire and running off into the woods to eat bloody raw meat. It was Vincent, I'd say, who finally got me to settle down and realize that I liked the fire. Between Anyway and Dogs, I finally learned to stop worrying and enjoy it.

Joshua: I think my roleplayiing's broken. The players don't want to do anything. They keep looking to me to tell them what to do. I even had this system with a protagonometer, where it makes it clear who's a major character so it's clear to them that they're in charge.
Vincent: Then play only using their cues.
Joshua: They don't want to give me any cues. They're all clammed up.
Vincent: Then they're broken. Play with someone else.
Joshua: Oh!
Vincent: And use a system that does what you want instead of all that other stuff.
Joshua: Yeah! I... wait, such a thing exists?
Vincent: Not really, but I can show you some games that do things that the designers wanted, then you can make your own!
Joshua: Yeah, I can!

And then I did.

In fact, I moved where I live now so that I can play with awesome people instead of the other kinds.

I am still fully mired in every kind of crust.

My brother, Sean (sirogit) was the one that brought me out into the light of day. If in no more profound way of going through with every gonzo idea we thought to play and proving me it could be done.

Yeah, yeah, Ron, Vincent.

But, seriously, Emily.

I remember staying up stupid-late the night I first met her, at the Baker's house, talking about our game designs.  I was talking about Polaris and how much conflict resolution sucked, because the pacing was off, and how I couldn't fix it, no matter how many widgets I added in from other Forge games.

"Well," she said, "what do you want the system to do?"

"I want it to force the players into hard choices where their knight has to bargain with a demon."

"Well," she said, "why not just do that?"

"oh." I said.

In the morning, I was basically done.

yrs--
--Ben

My first posts here, after about a year of lurking, were my fumbling attempts to put narrativism into practice in a game of Heroquest using a generic fantasy setting in the flavor of A Game of Thrones. I was concerned I wasn't doing it right - it being the awesome play I had read about here but never quite experienced in real life.

I'm sure those initial posts telegraphed my anxieties and showed how hard I was grasping for the means to shape or control things to reach the kind of play I had read about here. But Mike Holmes patiently answered my questions, offered thoughts on my actual play post of the first session, and helped me loosen up, to realize that you cannot control it - that grasping for control only squelshes the awesomeness. By the end of the game, I was left completely in awe of what my players and I had wrought, a blood opera with tragedy and pathos unrivaled in anything I could ever have planned out or railroaded. Needless to say, I've never looked back.

So thanks Mike, your replies changed gaming for me. 

Nicolas Crost, over at GroFaFo. And I fought back, tooth and claw, for quite some time.

- Frank

A large portion of unteaching happened right here at The Forge.

Chris Chinn (Bankuei) began it all right here, designing Well of Souls. Then Chris and Mike Holmes helped me out a lot here, and here, here, and here. At least this is where it started. I keep unlearning in small steps. And sometimes a big lightbulb goes off, such as when I first read, and subsequently played My Life With Master last fall.

Thank you guys.

You, Paul. And everybody else.

I come from an Improv background so, for me, it was Keith Johnstone and various people who taught his stuff. They were BATS Improv in San Francisco, especially Laura Derry and Derek Cochran, and then Tom Salinsky and Deborah White at The Spontaneity Shop in London. But it was all Keith Johnstone's stuff.

Anyway. I'm aware those names won't mean much to most other people, but it's good to namecheck people you've learnt from.

Graham

Two people:

Ron

Meredith

Probably in that order of impact. I might not ever have crawled out from under the rock if not for this place and Ron's essays and stuff, and there would be no Primetime Adventures, at least not in recognizable form, if not for Meredith.

This is going to sound something like a broken record, but...

Reading Ron's posts on Gaming Outpost and exchanging emails with him really started me on the path of unlearning a lot of unsatisfactory behaviors and assumptions about gaming. it was a slow process, with lots of starts and stops, hiccups and sudden breakthroughs, but that was how it started.

More recently, it was reading Vincent's posts and comments on Anyway. And Chris Chinn's posts on his gaming blog. Both of those people have written things that were like zen smacks to the head, further shaking me up and breaking off the accumulated crust.

Most recently, it's been my daughter Morgan. She's the same age I was when shared imaginative "Let's Pretend" play became massively important to me (8 and 9). I had been doing it all my life, but when I think back to when it really defined my view of the world and who I was, it was that age that keeps coming back to me. Trying to get back to that simple "Let's Pretend" play is really helping me shake off more of that accumulated crust and unlearn gaming.

This name will probably mean nothing to most of everyone here:

Alex Lowe for teaching me that the impossible is possible.  He was tragically taken from us by an avalanche.

A location with a personality of its own:

Appalachian Trail for teaching me that everything I thought didn't mater and that the world is a much different place than I thought and that you make your own reality and that you can live pretty high and mighty on $2000 for six months.  And that travel is cheap, so you should do it.

And a gamer:

Red Rahm. He made the games that I wanted to play and put them in a magazine that he owned, so high quality games ran only $5 and less if you subscribed.

I'm still feeling a bit cruft-y, myself. But I credit this place with showing me that I can be something else.

Jeez...  I'm still needing to be untaught but at least the process has started.

Ron gets a lot of credit with me.  His essays really challenged some of my basic assumptions and then his dialogue here at the Forge helped continue the process.

Tony did a huge amount of work on me (mostly unintentional, I'm sure) through one trip to GenCon.  Capes was the game I knew I'd hate and that I also knew just couldn't work as written with people who weren't involved in the Indie scene.  I was wrong.

Vincent has a way of chipping away at my brain damage without even meaning to.

Mike Holmes does the same thing.

Thanks, guys.

My unteachers . . .  well, I'll put the first unlearning on the game group I met (back in '94ish) and played with (still do, occasionally) out here in California.  Which I met through almost-friends, and through which I made real-friends, including Jenny (who's somehow seen fit to live with me for, oh, a lot of years now).  I was a big gamer in the late 70's-early 80's, but in the mid-80's-early-90's I nearly became convinced that whatever fun I'd found in the activity must have been possible only when young.  Because from '83-'93 or so, EVERY attempt I made to find folks to play with was a disaster.  I needed to be untaught the conclusion that it wasn't possible for functional adults to include RPGs as part of their social activities, and those folks did it.  I thank them often for that.

Next I had to unlearn the notion that RPGs, while fun, were in the end a trivial and unimportant social activity.  GO and the Forge unlearnt me of that idea, mostly through the vehicle of GNS and Actual Play reports.  Over-intellectualized claptrap or not (mostly, I'll go with NOT), it was - and is - important for me to be able to actually look at this activity, um, seriously.  Not un-fun serious, but worthy-of-thought serious.  Ron, Clinton, Paul, Ralph, Mike, (I'll even include Jared!) and many others down the years helped me do just that, and I try and remember to thank them for it from time to time.  Like now.  Thanks, all.

One thing I'm unlearning right now, and I'm not yet sure I've got great unteachers for 'it: the "20 mins of fun in 4 hours" cruft.  That oft-used and oft-debated phrase may be (is, in my experience) over-stated, but there is truth there.  We (groups I play with) spend more time doing not-fun things on our way to the fun things than I'd like.  And while pacing is a reality, I'm convinced there's cruft here in addition to that.  As I've no (un)teachers around me right now who are as bothered by that particular cruft as I am, unlearning is a bit slow.  And somehow I think that same cruft stands in the way of taking play all the way from a valid social activity, worthy of some serious thought, through to becoming an acknowledged, meaningful interpersonal experience.  That RAWKS.

So I plan to unlearn some more, and I'll take my unteachers as I find 'em.  Good call on that, Paul,

Gordon

Hello,

I think a lot of people who participate at the Forge ought to recognize Mike Holmes' unteacher contributions, for years at Indie Design and more recently among the HeroQuest crowd.

Best,
Ron

Mike taught me how to make the pointy stick! (Though, to be fair I should note that Ron tried a time or two back in the day. But when I flung poo at him and bit his toe off, he kind of gave up for a bit.)

One of the big things that Mike did for me, actually, wasn't even untrain me. His posts on the HQ forum here often helped me convert my game groups. I'd be struggling with my monkey language to try to explain things like kickers and bangs and do such a lousy job that I'd turn them right off the whole idea. But when I could give them on of Mike's posts to read it would flip them right round and make them say, "OH! Why didn't you say that! That sounds cool!"